


The End

by urusai_lilania



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcoholic Tony Stark, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Depression, Gen, Gun Violence, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 20:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12350496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urusai_lilania/pseuds/urusai_lilania
Summary: Tony Stark is a man afflicted, and he's done his best to keep it from everyone that could possibly save him. All but one. The day has come; he's ready to be saved.





	The End

**Author's Note:**

> This piece has been sitting around on my computer for a couple years now, so I decided to fill in the gaps and finish the thing! Here you go~

Tony’s chest heaved as he desperately sought to replenish his dwindling oxygen levels. Intense pain flared, daring him to expand his chest cavity again. Closing his eyes and clenching his teeth, he slowly hissed and released the burning stale air from his lungs.

He’d made a mistake.

Honestly, he’d made _many_ mistakes, but he hadn’t really thought it was such a big deal. Not something that would end with him lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, twitching incessantly. He was afraid of when the twitching would finally stop. When _he_ would finally stop.

This was how Bruce Banner, the notorious mad scientist and Tony Stark’s dearest “science bro”, saved Tony from himself.

Despite the screaming pain he felt and the shadow looming threateningly over him, Tony laughed.

~~~

Three in the morning. Time was inconsequential to Tony Stark, and honestly Bruce rather liked that aspect of his friend. What he _didn’t_ much like was his friend’s deepening depression. So time was quickly becoming inconsequential to Bruce Banner as well, as he tried to preoccupy his frantic friend’s overactive mind. He’d moved back into the tower to fill the void Pepper’s departure had made, had eventually moved into the penthouse floor once Tony had cleared a room for him. The team didn’t know.

There were quite a few things the “team” didn’t know, Bruce quickly realized. Tony had offhandedly suggested he retire from the superhero business, to maybe focus his attention on some more passive improvements to the world via his company and his inventions. The others accepted it at face value; other than the ever-focused Steve, Tony had been (rather extremely) publicly in the superhero game the longest. The work took its toll on all of them, but Tony wore the stress most visibly, second to Bruce himself (and frankly, none of them had known Bruce to be any other way).

If only they had known just how bad it was becoming. There was the time after the Chitauri invasion, when the news stations chronicled Tony’s apparent instability, but the world was always quite troubled, and no one from their ragtag team was around to assist Tony.

No one but Bruce.

He came in at the tail end, of course, having been keeping to himself and away from the real world. Tony played the whole ridiculously stressful event off, reverting to his exaggerated persona. But he was happy to see Bruce. There was a connection there that he didn’t share with anyone else, and Bruce allowed him to share it. Too many times did Tony feel the people around him couldn’t connect with him on _any_ level.

And that was when his connection to Pepper began to fray.

She was professional to the letter, and he loved her, and she loved him. There was love all around. But they couldn’t bear with one another. Never in Tony’s life did he believe he would love someone so much that he couldn’t bear to be with them. And so, they parted. She remained a close friend, a whispering warning anytime he treaded too far into his dangerous cycle of behavior. She also continued to represent his company, and for that he was grateful. It was utterly beyond him to oversee Stark Industries these days.

Bruce, being a good friend, would intercept Pepper’s communications on some of the messier days. Tony didn’t want to disappoint her, even if she knew him well enough to guess. He didn’t seem to think it mattered if Bruce was disappointed in him. Bruce wasn’t sure what to think, honestly. The man was broken; he knew what that felt like. How could he look down on him knowing that? Tony needed him, and Bruce needed to feel needed. So he stayed, despite his better judgement, which was screaming at him that this was all a horrible, horrible mistake.

Bruce would later wish he had listened to the voice; it was always correct, _especially_ when it came to Tony.

~~~

The end smelled of remarkably strong whiskey, smoke, and barbecue sauce.

Bruce folded his jacket over his arm and glanced around the suite. Bottles formed an upside-down pyramid on the glass coffee table by the roaring fireplace. At the bar, Tony was pouring a set of drinks and licking his fingers. “About time you showed up. I thought you’d finally run off again,” he remarked. His voice was unbalanced, Bruce noted. The man had honestly thought he’d fled. But that surely wasn’t enough to push him to drink _this_ much…

Tossing his jacket across the top of a chair and walking up to the bar, Bruce sighed. “Bit early, isn’t it?”

“I can’t possibly drink as much as I need to drink tonight, so I had to get started as early as possible.”

Bruce shook his head; the logic was all too typical of the man, for better or for worse—in this case, far, far worse. “This isn’t healthy, Tony.”

Twisting his lips in a gesture of acknowledgement, Tony returned with a flourish of his hand, “Neither are the hot wings. Eat up, I can hardly eat them all.”

Glancing around at the spread, Bruce rolled up his sleeves. “You expecting company?”

“Just you.” A smile, albeit a pained one. It hurt Bruce to see it directed his way.

“…Did you try to call me?”

“No. Had fun with smoke signals from the rooftop for a while, though.”

Knowing how his friend’s mind worked, Bruce nodded. “…And that led to a barbecue craving, I take it.”

“Pretty much, yeah. Sit down already, you’re making me nervous.” As if to prove this point, Tony scratched irritably at the back of his ear, his face twitching.

Obediently, Bruce slipped onto a barstool and picked up a wing, nibbling at it and staring questioningly at his friend. “So, what do you want?” The wing was edible, which meant it was delivery and not one of Tony’s misguided attempts at cooking…

Cocking his head to the side and swirling his current drink in his hand, Tony said in the most falsely jovial tone Bruce had heard to date, “We need to talk.”

Bruce swallowed the last bit of meat on the wing; it travelled down his throat in a hard, painful lump. Tony and talking did not go together, at least, not when it was just him and Bruce. With others, his stories had a twist of self-deprecating humor but were relatively safe. With Bruce… well, what happened next was pretty much par for the course.

~~~

Bruce had no idea how much alcohol was running through Tony’s system. “You can have everything. You can even have my stash of frozen blueberries.”

“This is serious, Tony.”

“My stash of frozen blueberries means everything to me. They’re _very_ serious,” Tony countered with a scowl.

Raising his hands before him, Bruce acquiesced. “I will gladly inherit your blueberries at a much later date.”

“Good. You better,” Tony muttered into his glass. He was sipping now, as opposed to tossing them down as he had been when Bruce first returned home, and for that he was thankful. He couldn’t imagine the raging storm inside Tony’s body, but he was certainly seeing flashes of the storm in the distraught man’s mind. “Mm. Heheh. Sorry,” Tony said suddenly, wiping his sleeve across his eyes. “I guess you don’t understand.”

“I understand that you’re depressed, and that you should stop drinking, and that you need a professional’s help more than me—”

“A professional wouldn’t care like you do,” Tony said, his voice nearly inaudible, his eyes staring away towards the shaded windows.

“I do care, Tony,” Bruce reiterated. He knew from personal experience that hearing words directly often helped more than simple knowledge. “I care. So I wish you would stop—”

“I don’t know how to stop,” Tony admitted hastily, looking to Bruce with an unexpectedly mournful stare. “I… I don’t know how to quit this game.” Was that shame? It certainly looked like shame…

Knitting his brow, Bruce rubbed the back of his skull. “You aren’t playing a game, Tony…”

“You know that’s bullshit,” the billionaire shot back, lips twitching as he suddenly threw back his drink. “ _You_ aren’t playing a game. But even with that, you know how to quit. You know how to just walk away and say fuck the rest of us.”

“Is that what you think I do?” Bruce muttered darkly.

Closing his eyes, Tony sighed. “No. You’re a lot less selfish than me. You don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to be the reason anyone gets hurt.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Is it? Is it really?” Tony stared and chuckled humorlessly. “Sometimes, I have ideas, and sometimes they sound honorable. But it’s always after something _else_. I’m always making up for something I’ve already done. There would be less trouble if I wasn’t there to make it.”

“People adore you for the trouble you cause…” It wasn’t the best defense, Bruce knew, but it was true. The world adored Tony Stark back when he was just a billionaire playboy weapons manufacturer; when he became a philanthropist, more of the right sort of people loved him. But none of them _knew_ him. And what Tony wanted right now was to be known intimately. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like you, Tony.”

“I know. But who _doesn’t_ like me?”

“Tony…”

“No, big guy, I get it, I do. I shouldn’t lump you in with all those other people. So you shouldn’t go and tell me I’m doing okay because all those other people adore me, get me?”

“Sorry.”

Silence passed. Tony tossed back another drink, to Bruce’s disappointment. Clearly the mood had regressed back into more dangerous territory. The “bequeath my frozen blueberries” will argument was something that came up in these times, a dark joke about the deplorable state of Tony’s mind.

Finally, softly, Tony asked, “Where will you go when I’m gone?”

“I’m not going anywhere, Tony.”

“Heh. You suck at lying. You’re a runner, Bruce. We both are.”

“You tackle your problems head-on, Tony. That’s not running.”

“Maybe I just run in the wrong direction.”

Another silence. Tony set his empty glass down and climbed onto his feet. Bathroom or the bar, Bruce wondered? The footsteps did not travel far. So, bar then. With a heavy sigh, Bruce leaned forwards in his seat and buried his head in his hands. He didn’t know the right words. He wasn’t trained for this sort of intervention. Tony wasn’t wrong; he was a runner. The dark clouds circling Tony urged Bruce to run before lightning struck, because knowing Bruce, it would strike _him_. It always did. And that was selfish of him, wasn’t it? Tony was his friend, and he was clearly struggling with suicidal thoughts on _some_ level. “I wish I could help you, Tony, I really do…” he said quietly, heaving a sigh.

“I know. I appreciate that, I do,” Tony said, coming back to sit in the chair opposite Bruce. “You can’t, but I know someone who can.”

Click.

Bruce froze. He knew that sound. He’d heard it probably a thousand times now, and it left him with a dangerous surge of bubbling rage each time. He _hated_ that sound. Slowly, ever so slowly, he swallowed the rising stomach acid and raised his head from his hands to look to Tony; between them, the mad scientist’s arm was raised, pointing a gun right at Bruce. With a half-hearted smile, Tony whispered, “Help me,” and pulled the trigger.

~~~

Bruce stared hard at the crumpled man on the floor. “Why would you do this to me?” he wondered aloud, his lower lip quivering. Rage and anguish fought for dominance over him, and he wanted to let them take over again. He hadn’t wanted to awaken to… to _this_. He wanted to drown in the emotions. To run. But the shell of a man that lay before him was a friend once—was still a friend, somehow. Despite everything they’d done, to the world and to one another, they were friends, colleagues, teammates, lovers, and at times, even enemies. But even in the farthest corners of their minds, they were not strangers. But what word could possibly describe _this_?

Tony had begged for this, subtly at first, then more and more intensely over the last few weeks, and Bruce had refused. He remembered that much. But it still happened. Tony knew how to trigger Bruce; the two men had confided in each other enough to know their weakest spots.

The worst part was that Bruce couldn’t save Tony, not the way the world would want him to. He couldn’t even bring himself to grant Tony the twisted savior he desperately wanted. So Tony had called upon the part of him that would, against every fragile piece of Bruce’s desires, against Bruce’s timid trust. As if Bruce needed to be shoved any farther down the rabbit hole.

Bruce did the only thing he could do, faced with Tony’s betrayal of everything either had ever meant, separately and together. He ran, chased by the cold realization that if he had just stayed away, Tony would have had to find another way. Another less definitive way, involving someone who could possibly save the poor man, instead of utterly destroying him.

Tony had trusted Bruce to be the man he wished he wasn’t.

Bruce had let both of them down.

And, unlike Tony, Bruce couldn’t go down that path. The brutal, violent thing that had killed the infamous Tony Stark was the very same brutal, violent thing keeping Bruce Banner alive.

**Author's Note:**

> Interested in checking out my original writing or spying on my two furbabbies antics? You can find us [here](http://nikkitapierrottie.com/)!


End file.
